


Miserable Restlessness, Turned Bleak

by Veneredirimmel (Smilla)



Category: Peaky Blinders (TV)
Genre: Breathplay, M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-01-09
Updated: 2019-01-09
Packaged: 2019-10-07 09:25:46
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,180
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/17363399
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Smilla/pseuds/Veneredirimmel
Summary: Got your fucking glasses collected for you, see how good of a friend I am? Meant as an olive branch, breaking of bread. Alfie hadn’t known whether Tommy would show up. Tommy had.





	Miserable Restlessness, Turned Bleak

**Author's Note:**

> Born as a dare between friends on how much we could mimic Alfie's speech pattern. I don't know how well I respected the prompt given, and definitely the mood went into a more morbid direction that I had envisioned at first, so beware of some dark seeping into it. 
> 
> Written for my lovely Maham@twitter.
> 
> Beta reading and comments provided by @Amonitrate, old friend, old cohort, new fandom.  
> All mistakes are mine.
> 
> Title from, Lake in a Storm, by Russel Atkins  
> Penultimate line has been inspired by Coffee, also by Russel Atkins
> 
> *

Alfie sees the world as a graveyard.

 

Weird thought to be having now, when he is grinding, on the expanse of his own bed, of his own bedsheets, above Thomas Shelby’s bird-like body. Freshly OBE, freshly undressed. He did it, undressed, with the precision and the frugality of movement he does everything else with. Coat. Jacket. Shoes. Holster. Waistcoat. Pocket watch, the lone small diamond casting a rainbow of reflected oil-lamp-light next to his gun, next to his cigarette case, on Alfie’s nightstand.

Tommy avoided eye contact, opting to measure Alfie’s sturdy furniture and possible escape routes.

 

_ We’ll fuck _ , he said, and there wasn’t a question in the statement and Alfie didn’t think to say no, to resist. Met it with  _ All right, mate. Good for me, mate _ . Thought it’d never happened again, not after  _ you crossed the line  _ and  _ they’re using my son _ .

 

There had been fire, then.

 

No economy of fury, then.

 

Alfie had wondered if he, like Tommy’s endangered son - like his dead wife - could ever be the cause of the same liberal rage, then.

 

It’d been a short-lived, foolish thought. Promptly forgotten, promptly drowned, promptly killed, slashed, cut into tiny, small pieces, then buried, buried,  _ buried _ where it can’t dig itself out ever again.

 

That’s why this started the way it did.

 

Night out between friends, associates, business partners. Telegram as an invite, because substance needs form, innit? And form defines the substance of what Alfie’s fucking offering.

 

_ Got your fucking glasses collected for you, see how good of a friend I am? _ Meant as an olive branch, breaking of bread. Alfie hadn’t known whether Tommy would show up. Tommy had. Immaculate suit, black coat, peaked cap low to hide half his face and cast the remaining half in the shadow of it. Alfie took him to dinner, proper like, it looked from outside.  _ Night’s on me. My territory, my place, my threat. _ Good food and good whiskey, Irish, Tommy’s usual.

 

Violence in the form of sanctioned sport between men, the blood flow controlled, respectable, and deeply unsatisfying.

 

Alfie’s stupidly glad Tommy isn’t wearing that ridiculous bowler hat, even though he walks through Alfie’s domain like he owns it, like he owns all fucking London and like he owns all the fucking world. Even though, across the dining room, men in ascots with their diamond-clad wives greet him, their face red with shame, because Tommy’s a heartless murdering mongrel, still, but he’s one who owns enough factories to be  _ power _ , and the King awarded him a fucking OBE only recently, the fucking King.

 

Alfie is caught in the middle of admiration and finding how well Tommy fakes propriety very ridiculous.

 

Night ends at Alfie’s place, despite Tommy having that fucking suite he can afford now booked at the Ritz. Because Alfie’s house is where Tommy’s collected glasses are, because it was the inevitable conclusion to their genial companionship.

 

So, it’s weird, right? That he’s thinking of corpses and cemeteries while he digs hard with his elbows into whatever softness he can find on the underside of Tommy’s arms. But that’s it, with Tommy. He does nothing to make Alfie stop thinking of dead bodies, going around being one already the way he does. Already dead, so it doesn’t matter.

 

It matters, now. That Alfie comes on the third grind-slash-swipe. Unmoors himself, too soon, wet and warm. He offers no resistance to the demands of his body, and feels no regret, leaves reddened bruises behind to mark his passing.  _ I was here _ . Both will be gone soon. He looks up, coming down from the blackout recess of pleasure and tingling nerves, sees no blue under a raised eyebrow. Mocking bastard. Everything is a competition, a bargain. Orgasms part of the deal. Alfie’s going to make him work for it. Shit you not, brother. Shit you not, asshole. Shit you not, you little jewel-stealing, canal-dwelling, gypsy mud-kicker.

 

_ Open your fucking eyes. _

 

Tommy does.

 

He inspects Tommy’s body from a skewed perspective: too white naked flesh, made interesting by ink, scars, a sprinkling of jet-black hairs, sparse like a bald crow. A story; a letter from the front Tommy never wrote. And still he won’t come. Alfie bites: a nipple, muscle, puckered bullet wounds, collarbone, earlobe; a speckle of clay rasps on his tongue: a memory.

 

Alfie bites lips, steals breathing air, until Tommy’s ribs raise against his chest, wanting, frantic, hard cock, hot-red and pulsing. There’s been some brand-new desperation in Tommy’s eyes, and a new stillness, which Alfie thinks funny, somehow impossible like adding less movement to a marble statue. But he knows. Fucked him up well, the government, Tommy saved his family when the nooses were already tightening around their necks to take away their breathing air the way Alfie’s taking Tommy’s now.

 

Glazed blue-eyes, a face too smooth to be a murderer, freckled like a choirboy, angel-like and deceptive. This is not the fake shit Tommy gives to the Mayor, to the City Council Board members, to the ascot-wearing lords and their diamond-clad ladies across the dining room. This the authentic, original model, walking-through life like a beautiful dead corpse, Thomas Shelby, kin-less, now.  _ Free _ , Tommy corrects.

 

And this is the Tommy Alfie’s laying on top of, covering both in length and span.

 

He’s only little, Ollie. Let him pass. Let him come, on Alfie’s timetable, on Alfie’s behest, spread and flattened on Alfie’s bedsheets, under Alfie’s weight.

 

Alfie won’t touch his cock until he does, more a matter of principle than unwillingness. He digs, bones on bones, hard, meant to hurt, his semen smooths the way, makes an easy travelling path of obscene sucking sound. Fingers around wrists, wrists driven down onto the mattress. Small friction. Then a tightening of intent. Head thrown back, Alfie loses his mouth, gains the vulnerable pulse on Tommy’s damp neck in its stead. Tommy comes.

 

*

 

Alfie sees the world as a graveyard. It happened ever since the war, at least that’s what he tells himself, so he feels better, so he’s found a guilty party. He sees rotting bodies, seeping wounds, open flesh, bones exposed, blood dried on sloppy, cold mud. On dirty snow. Nothing of that white clean _ , pure _ , shit in the trenches in winter, but a murky soup of shit and piss and screams for mums and the ever-present cold mud. 

 

Snow is deadly, Alfie’s mum knows.

 

Alfie wonders if Tommy screamed for his own mum, while he dug himself out of the collapsed tunnel. Or if he swallowed clay with his open mouth, while he swam up-stream, not through water, but through wet viscid clay.

 

Alfie sees: his own body, soon, soonish, in a week, a month, a year - inside a mahogany casket, riddled inside and outside, dug deep inside the earth where it can’t dig itself out. He comes again as Tommy does, not a sound from either of them. A breath.

 

_ Get the fuck off me _ , says Tommy, too softly, no bite. It doesn’t register.

The night has weight, and it saves them both from immediate death. Neither move for a long while.

 

\--

 


End file.
